Discussing sleep paralysis might be an infohazard…
The times I’ve entered sleep paralysis it hasn’t bothered me, as I knew what it was.
Michael Roe
Karma: 260
And then you get the people who are like, “Great! I’m lucid! Now I shall cast one of those demon summoning spells from Vajrayana Buddhism.”
Lucid dreaming is often like being Sigourney Weaver in Alien while also being on hospital sedatives. (You are, in fact, actually asleep, so it’s kind of a miracle you can reason at all and not the least bit surprising that you feel a bit groggy; also, dream can be nightmarish).
Why people choose to do this for fun is an interesting question.
You do get people who think they might get into lucid dreaming, then they read the dream diaries of some of the experienced lucid dreamers, and then are like “OMG, I never, ever, want to experience that.”
Well, it’s an interesting question whether there might be more efficient ways to do it.
Lucid nightmares are quite a good way of exposing you to real-seeming dangers without actually dying.
Reading this article, I have just realised that a dream I had last night came from reading one of those test cases where people try to bypass the guardrails on LLMs. Only the dream was taken from the innocuous part of the prompt.
At this rate, I’m going to be having dreams about turning Lemsip(*) into meth.
(*) UK cold remedy. Contains pseudoephedrine.
Chöd in a lucid dream if you’re feeling brave.
Like transform into vajrayogini and invite the demons to devour your corpse, etc,
And then there’s the thing where you dispel the entire dream-universe are just there in a black formless void.
Hmm… but, for example, stabilising a dream is kind of like a meditation, and one of the many ways you can transform your body in a dream is basically a body scan meditation from hatha yoga.
Given the significance of lucid dreaming in Buddhist practise (Siz Yogas of Naropa, etc.) realising that having a lucid dream just for sexual purposes is kind of pointless may lead to you realising that it’s kind of pointless in waking life too. Many of those guys were monks…
I’m not sure about (10).
Whenever someone has a theory that it’s impossible to do thing X in a dream, the regular lucid dreamers will provide a counterecamp,e by deliberately doing X in their next dream.
Computers, clocks, and written text can behave weirdly in dreams. Really, it’s the same things that generative AI has diffuculty with, possibly for information-theory reasons.
A possible benefit: the regulation of your own emotion that you do to keep a dream stable (even when alarming things are happening in it) may help you keep your emotion stable in the waking state too.
I can lucid dream, and I kind of agree here. Sure, lucid dreaming is possible, but why would you do that?
Re (3), a dream you can completely control tells you nothing you didn’t know already. There is some scope for controlling the dream enough to, in effect, set up a question, and then not control the result.
There a running joke in the lucid dreaming community that the first thing everyone tries is either flying or sex. It’s only when you get to #3 on their list of things they want to do that it becomes at all interesting.
Some psychiatry textbooks classify “overvalued ideas” as distinct from psychotic delusions.
Depending on how wide you make the definition, a whole rag-bag of diagnoses from the DSM V are overvalued ideas (e.g, anorexia nervosa over valuing being fat).
Possibly similar dilemma with e.g. UK political parties, who generally have a rule that publicly supporting another party’s candidate will get you expelled.
An individual party member, on the other hand, may well support the party’s platform in general, but think that that one particular candidate is an idiot who is unfit to hold political office—but is not permitted to say so,
(There is a joke about the Whitby Goth Weekend that everyone thinks half the bands are rubbish, but there is no consensus on which half that is. Something similar seems to hold for Labour Party supporters.)
An organisation such as the Catholic Church primarily wants to perpetuate its own existence, so of course the official doctrine is that they are The One True Church.
An individual Catholic, on the other hand, might genuinely believe that the benefits of religion are also available from other suppliers.
COVID-19 killed, idk, tens of millions worldwide rather than hundreds of millions.
But consider that an example of a (biological) virus takeoff of the order of months.
So the question for AGI takeoff .. death rate growing more rapidly than COVID19 pandemic, or slower?
Takeoff speed could be measured by e.g. the time between the first mass casualty incident that kills thousands of people vs the first mass casualty incident that kills hundreds of millions.
(This bit isn’t serious) “i mean, a days long takeoff leaves you will loads of time for the hypersonic missiles to destroy all of Meta’s datacenters.”
Minutes long takeoff...
[By comparison, I forget the reference but there is a paper estimating how quickly a computer virus could destroy most of the Internet. About 15 minutes, if I recall correctly.]
Well, we had that guy who tried to assassinate the Queen of England with a crossbow because his AI girlfriend told him to. That was clearly a harm to him, and could have been one for the Queen.
We don’t know how much more “But the AI told me to kill Trump” we’d have with less alignment, but it’s a reasonable guess (given the Replika datapoint) that it might not be zero,